Seven Minutes to Midnight
by Hazgarn
Summary: John Murdoch is starting to remember who he was before being brought to the Dark City. The abyss has begun to stare back. Spoilers for the movie and volume 4 of Heroes. Contains pre-slash between two Heroes characters in later chapters...
1. Prelude

**Prelude**

They stood in the alleyway where the centerpiece of the machine had fallen, exposed to the world. Schreber was hunched against a wall, his arms clasped tight around him, either a protective gesture or a pained one. With so broken a man as the good doctor, Murdoch found it difficult to tell.

"What are you going to do—now, John?" The doctor's eyes were alight with the excitement of John's victory—_their_ victory, really. For while a still voice inside told him that he could have come to understand the workings of the Strangers' technology with study, there would never have been time to do so without Schreber.

"I'm going to fix things." The answer was a simple one, really. At that moment, everything seemed so simple. "You told me I had the power, didn't you?"

"I can make these machines do anything I want, make this world anything I want it to be, just so long as I concentrate hard enough."

He wasn't sure if it was the words themselves or the still tone of his voice that drained the enthusiasm from the doctor's expression. Schreber was left staring at him as one might a strange dog, uncertain of its friendliness.

Without another word he turned to the machine where it had settled on its side. A part of himself was quietly amused that the face of the device resembled a clock, though he wasn't sure why this was so. It just seemed right. Without numbers and canted at an angle it was impossible to say what time it would properly read. In a way, he supposed it didn't really matter. Without a true day or night, time had been one of the cruelest illusions. False promises and lies were all this place had to offer.

That was one of the first things he would have to fix.

He could feel the mechanisms as they churned, buried deep and unseen beneath him. He could feel how the parts were supposed to fit together. He could feel the damage that had been dealt by the upheaval of the Strangers' warren being broken open like a hornet's nest. Without their influence, the machine responded to the lightest touch of his will. A discordant vibration that had crept into its working ground itself out as the machine began to mend, twisted metal and more exotic elements knitting together like healing flesh. Soon the City itself would be ticking along flawlessly, matching its rhythm. Just another exertion of will, so slight, and he set the first of his plans into motion.

The hand on the clock began to move and he stepped away, satisfaction tugging the corner of his mouth into the thinnest ghost of a smirk. He turned toward the mouth of the alley, rubble crunching loudly under his feet. The mess would soon sort itself out. He had places to be.

"Where are you going?"

He turned around to regard the doctor almost as if he'd forgotten him. A part of him had, he realized, as though the man had been part of the background. Unimportant. An expression wrote itself upon his face that evidenced amusement at the question, as though all the answers should have come to Schreber as simply as they had to him, and it was with the same empty humor that he delivered his answer.

"Shell Beach."


	2. On the First Day, Part I: Nightmare

**On the First Day, Part I**

The sun rose for the first time upon the City.

Its rays stretched over road and building, brick and concrete and steel, claiming it like the grasp of a possessive hand. It glinted off of windows, lighting them for the first time like a thousand crystal beacons. In a modest apartment on the eastern edge of the City, it met the resistance of thick, dull curtains. They had been shut tightly against the echoes of nighttime traffic and the brave lights that had endeavored bravely to illuminate the shadowed streets. They held out valiantly but were unprepared for this strange new intruder. The sunlight stole in on soft feet, creeping slowly across the floor. Its leisurely efforts eventually pierced the heart of the room's shadows, its warm light revealing the sleeping form of a woman.

And as she had been on so many nights of late, she lay trapped in the cold bonds of fitful sleep.

To all the world concerned, her name was Heather Collins. She had been born into a small middle-class family, had lived her life in a middle-class neighborhood. She had spent the majority of the past forty years employed as a secretary in one part of the City or another. She was in her mid-sixties and had never married. She had no family living now. Her life had always been quiet, and uneventful. Somewhat lonely. A cruel person might say insignificant. It was not a life that had touched many. It was not a life that should have inspired nightmares.

And yet, for the past two months, Ms. Collins' sleep had been plagued with fear. She woke nights trembling, her dark hair damp with sweat, a scream lodged frozen in her throat. And after waking, even with her eyes open the images would continue to dance before her vision, complete in vivid and horrible detail.

In her dreams she saw the City, the space between every building occupied by a sense of palpable and incomprehensible menace. Silent cars lined the streets in long, still lines, and people slumbered inside them, utterly helpless. Some nights her dreams dragged her through endless expanses of cold, dark emptiness, dreams from which she awoke feeling trapped. She dreamt of an immense clock, ticking implacably, painted by shadows within a pale green gloom. And in her darkest dreams she was stalked by pale figures with long, reaching shadows and circular, gaping maws lined with teeth where their faces should be.

It was nights ago she first dreamt of the lightning and thunder, of buildings shattered and broken like glass. She saw the great clock sundered, and streets burst open, and the creeping monsters uprooted from the earth like pallid grubs. She saw the City itself, broken in half, and she saw it mend itself again. In her dream, she knew that destruction and creation both were born of a single man. And when she woke, always before she saw him, the fear on her tongue was touched with bitter hatred.

Warm light caressed her face and Heather's eyes fluttered open. She lay still several moments breathing shallowly, struggling to bring her crashing pulse to rest. As always, her latest dream drifted back to her with perfect clarity.

_She sees him in pieces only, a patchwork phantom sewn out of a dozen dark, shifting faces, but she knows him all the same. He is alone, suspended against consuming darkness and cold starlight. He brings his hands together, and from his cupped palms water pours, first a stream then a cascade. The torrent blooms outward, spreading below him, stretching out for miles until it has become an ocean. The last drops expend themselves and he walks like a dark messiah with the black, crashing waters churning beneath his feet. The land is born from underneath the waves, and like a jutting spear she sees the lighthouse rise before her. _

_And behind it, the sun rises as though for the first time. His figure is lost from her sight, swallowed by its shadow… _

Heather drew back the curtains with a trembling hand and the sunlight spilled into the room. Her reflection in the glass pane before her showed her plainly what that light revealed: the stark bruises that had crept in under her dark eyes, the lines etched harshly into her face by weariness. She only observed this for a moment before her gaze passed through, and she looked beyond into the City. Against the pale dawn, the City held such an alien look that she briefly doubted she could have ever seen the sight before. For just a moment she glimpsed blue, shimmering on the horizon.

Despite the soft sunlight that bathed her in its warmth, she shivered.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Sorry this chapter has been late in coming. I blame it on a recently acquired addiction to _Elder Scrolls IV_. To facilitate things going a little faster, I've split the chapter I _was_ working on into three parts.

I like to think I've made it pretty transparent what is going on. The principle characters involved in this story are _not _OCs. I hope it's as clear as I intended it to be just who is who. Sometimes I _fail_ at obvious, though.


	3. On the First Day, Part II: Symmetry

**On the First Day, Part II**

The sun rose for the first time.

In the heart of the City, shadows clung on to their existence greedily, holding out between the buildings. Somewhere west of the City's center, one shadow, immense and deep, thrived still at the base of a squat, sprawling building. Inside, electric light of a bright, antiseptic quality reigned, spilling out from the windows but failing monumentally in banishing the darkness without. There, a taxicab was parked on the road. The small sign on its roof glowed humbly in the darkness as it waited.

The cab seemed poised at the very edge of the building's shadow where it fell like a suffocating blanket across the dark street—perched as though prepared to make its escape.

To all the world concerned, the driver's name was Anthony Romano. While it seemed as though he waited patiently on his fare, this was far from the truth. In reality, he was watching the sky. Like most nights he had sat, watching the stars wherever and whenever he could catch a glimpse of them, straining through streetlight and cloud and fog. But now, though the eastern horizon was blocked from his view, he watched as those same stars were devoured by the encroaching light of day. He watched the light crawl up the buildings, the sun glittering in a brilliant, rosy splendor upon the windows. It struck him suddenly that it should seem so rare and special a sight to see. He wondered quietly when last he had taken the time to watch a sunrise.

It stirred something in him, a pressure that was almost painful. He found himself wishing he had a better view. He thought about what the dawn would look like were he up on top one of the towering buildings. Or even above them… What would that be like? He almost failed to register as his prospective passenger arrived, still lost in the wandering of his own thoughts as the man slid into his seat and the door slammed behind him. The cab rocked with surprising force, and Tony was rung soundly free from his daydreams.

"Corner of Florence and Mendel, please."

With a wordless nod to his passenger, Tony pulled the cab out onto the street.

To all the world concerned, Tony's fare was Julian Singhal. He had just come off of a late shift at the hospital—an _extra_ shift—and he was exhausted. Under normal circumstances, he would have been content to drift into a half-sleep until arriving at his home, yet for the past week his circumstances had been anything but. The unusual had consumed his mind, burdening him with worries that precluded casual slumber. Still, amid the jumbled snarl of anxiety that had infested his mind something possessed him to take a look backwards as they drifted amidst the traffic, in search of what had captivated the driver. For a moment his troubled mind was cleansed of its apprehension as his eyes drank in the sight, the colors. Julian saw the sunrise, feeling an odd sense of wonder—and loss. He must have made a small noise that caught the driver's attention.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"Quite." His reply came out rather curt, far more than he'd intended. Julian had never made it a habit to speak with strangers and the troubles that had crept so recently into his life had only made him more sensitive to the notice of others. Given a choice, he would just as soon pass the trip in silence. However, the driver seemed to have other thoughts on the subject of conversation.

"I mean, it happens every morning, but…" Tony paused for a moment as he collected together his thoughts from earlier. "I mean, we kind of just take it for granted sometimes, don't we?"

"I suppose so…" Julian admitted slowly, for his own thoughts had held a remarkably similar tone. For a moment, something in the other man's voice seemed almost familiar. He wondered briefly if they'd met before, and the sudden biting curiosity drew him out of his ordinarily solitary shell. "What's your name?"

The driver's eyes spared a quick glance into the rearview mirror. He caught brief sight of his passenger, of black bangs that shrouded dark brown eyes like a curtain, and found himself struck with a brief certainty that he'd seen those eyes before.

"I'm Tony."

"Julian." He hesitated for a moment, moved to share his thoughts with this man, uncertain why that should be. Casting a glance, almost accusatory, to the hands which sat curled carefully in his lap he realized that his recent concerns had driven him to isolate himself. "Tony... Do you ever get the feeling like you were meant to do…something else?"

Tony snorted a laugh, mouth pulling sideways in an uneven smile. "All the time, I drive a _cab_.

"No, I mean—_who_ you are. I'm talking about being…" He caught himself, unsure whether he was unable or simply unwilling to put into words what he truly meant.

"Being…special." Tony could not have said, if asked, why the words come to his lips. He couldn't even begin to imagine why they seemed to affect Julian as strongly as they did.

"Yes". The reply came out feebly, quiet from a mouth suddenly very dry. Julian managed a slow, hesitant nod.

A moment passed between the two men in which each experienced a short-lived yet powerful feeling of symmetry, though neither were aware that it was shared by the other. For the most part, the interior of the cab was ruled by silence for the rest of the drive. Though Julian had longed earlier for the quiet, those long, speechless minutes passed almost painfully. As they'd grown closer to his destination, Julian's mind had been screaming, demanding escape from the cab, fighting with stern effort not to throw himself out the door while the car was still going and just _run_. Eventually the taxi came to a stop in front of the shabby cluster of apartments where Julian made his home. He wrestled the money out of his wallet after a period of desperate fumbling, passing the bills off almost blindly as he grappled with the door handle.

Their fingertips touched. A sensation passed between them, like cool lightning brushing the skin. Julian jerked his hand back as though bitten, flexing numb, tingling fingers. As far as he could see, Tony seemed rattled by the experience as well. For several seconds he merely stared at his hand which had closed spasmodically into a crushing fist around the bills. His questioning eyes turned to Julian, whose own expression he was certain returned only panic.

"Did you—"

Julian did not wait for the driver to finish. Still clutching the handle, he swung the door open with a quickness and was out of the cab in moments. The door crashed shut behind him with startling power, splitting the rear window with a dramatic crack. Tony's eyes were drawn to the fracture, widening in surprise. By the time he looked back to the sidewalk, his passenger was nowhere in sight.

Running a hand over his mouth, Tony directed the cab cautiously back into the stream of increasing traffic. After a few blocks, he turned into an alley and shut down the engine. He sat silently in the taxi for a long while—minutes stretching out uncertainly as he tried to wrap his mind around what had happened. He examined the hands which rested loosely on the wheel. In the rearview mirror, he eyed the crack marred the rear window of the cab. His reflection in the mirror was sheet-white. He shut his eyes, drawing in a slow breath that left his lungs as an anxious laugh.

He wasn't sure what had happened. He didn't know _what_ he was going to tell his boss about the damage. He decided it was just as well his passenger had left in such a hurry.

_Would've sounded nuts, anyway, asking the guy if when we touched he'd also seen my hand _glow…

* * *

**Author's Note:** I've added a line of disclaimer to the summary. It should be plain after reading this chapter why I've done that. I normally prefer to warn in advance about certain elements, but this honestly didn't suggest itself to me until late. Apologies to anyone dissatisfied with the development. I just like their chemistry, sorry.


	4. On the First Day, Part III: Memory

**On the First Day, Part III**

The sun rose.

It shone in through a window, throwing the latticed silhouette of the steel mesh that enclosed it onto the opposite wall. On the bed sat a young woman. Her knees were tucked up under her chin as she watching the golden square of light slide slowly down the bland wallpaper. The warm tone of the light made her think of melting butter. As she imagined the dawn that was blooming somewhere outside her room, it also filled her with a strange sense of hope.

To all the world concerned, the girl's name was Catherine Farris. As far as Catherine was concerned, all the world could crawl in a hole and die.

Jeanette, the woman who claimed to be her mother was a cold-hearted bitch who disgusted her. She had regretted the hurt in Mr. Farris' eyes when she'd spat in his face that he wasn't her father, but the regret didn't make the words any less true. She knew it was all a lie. She was beginning to remember things. She was remembering that "father" should be a man with eyes like steel that had a special way of softening just for her, and "mother" should be a woman full of understanding and patience, love and _faith_. She felt there was a place in her heart for "brother", and it sat cold and empty, hollow. She thought she remembered freckles.

No one believed her, of course. In the beginning, the images—the _memories_—had been so scattered and fragmented that she hadn't believed them either. Jeanette had thrown money at her problems like she always did and sent her broken daughter to a shrink. They'd used big, fancy words like "dissociation" and "delusion" that really just amounted to thinking she was insane. But as time wore on, and the fragments piled up, holes began to fill, and she realized they were wrong. They _had_ to be wrong.

All her insistence and begging, her pleading for someone to listen hadn't helped her case, of course. It had only landed her here.

At first that had been the worst thing imaginable. The life she was slowly coming to reclaim from beneath the lie that had been painted over the top of it, it was out there somewhere. _They_ were out there, her family. Her _real_ family... Perhaps they were looking for her. Perhaps they only waited for _her_ to find _them_. She could do nothing from within the hospital, the doctors made certain to monitor her closely. She'd felt the cage closing slowly around her. Eventually, she'd grown tired of it. She'd grown tired of arguing and not being believed. Eventually she decided that if she could convince the staff and her family and friends from her false life that she was getting better, maybe they would let her go… She could be free of this place, and perhaps then she could truly begin her search.

Then, two days ago, she'd remembered something _else_…

She wasn't quite so eager to be let out of the hospital anymore. And, of course, now the doctors wanted to know _why_.

It was still very early in the morning when a soft knock was heard and the door swung open slowly. Though, Catherine had not slept in two days, so the timing didn't really matter. The visit was not wholly unexpected, though the visitor seemed a bit out of place... Dr. Roper normally came in at the beginning of the night shift, so it was rather unusual to see him in just after dawn. She wondered briefly if they'd switched his hours, and who with. Oddly, she couldn't seem to remember which of the staff worked days.

"Good morning, Cathy." Dr. Roper greeted, a touch awkwardly. "Ms. Daley tells me you're still not sleeping. Would you tell me what's wrong?"

"You know what's wrong." She kept her eyes on the wall. She'd learned not to make eye-contact with him. He was a surprisingly shifty one. When she was being difficult, they always sent Dr. Roper. Something about him just put her off her guard. Maybe it was the goofy moustache—or those silly looking, owlish glasses of his.

"I haven't been given the full report on it," he said, dragging a chair away from the wall so that he could sit eye-to-eye with her. "They've told me you've added another element to the mythology of your delusion. An antagonistic figure. A man who is trying to hurt you."

Catherine snorted. She was fairly certain that they'd started to believe this whole issue was some kind of bizarre rape trauma. She'd stopped caring what he or anyone else thought about it.

"Tell me about him."

"He's not a man." She supplied, almost bored. Fussing with a loose string in the white bottoms of her hospital clothes, she slowly worried it into a small hole. "He wants me dead."

She glanced at Dr. Roper briefly, seeing the formation of a frown, barely visible under the thick whiskers on his upper lip.

"Catherine," Though his voice was kept professionally even, the use of her full name betrayed his concern. "If this man hurt you, we can help. We can stop him. Do you know his name?"

She felt sorry for him, honestly. He wanted to help. But there were some things a person couldn't be saved from.

"He's not a man," she repeated, "He's a monster."

Catherine met Dr. Roper's gaze steadily. "And his name is Sylar."


	5. Fiat Lux

**Fiat Lux**

Even from his vantage in the heart of the city it had been beautiful, the light painting first the buildings and then the sky in colors that for so long had existed only in the shadow of memory. The City itself seemed new, a new image painted over the old in a palette of daytime hues. Colors that Schreber himself had lost entirely, until now. For him it was the _first_ sunrise. The first day of his life, whatever he might make of it.

The future had seemed to so full of promise after that first dawn, shining brightly ahead of him, like a beacon.

It was with such an agonizing slowness that he came to realize how cruelly he'd been deceived. To see how alone he truly was. Alone. The City was filled with people, living out their lives day to day in ignorance of the darkness from which they had been saved. They lived with families that might be strangers, with friends who might once have been enemies, enemies that may at one time have been lovers… But for all that it was, at the base of things, a hideous illusion they had ties, bonds, hopes, a foundation upon which to build their own dreams for the future. What future could there possibly be for a man with no past?

It was a painful realization. Without the Strangers, the experiment was over. Without the experiment, he no longer served a purpose in this world

Fiat lux. The possibilities had seemed so endless. But the daylight shone down, now, upon the flaws in the false world around him. It shone upon his own flaws, his broken state of self. He found it quite simple returning to routine, a routine of quiet, shrouded research in the hours of darkness, alone in the shadows. The lies put in place for his observation of the City still held. He had his offices, the lab for his cover as a normal scientist. When he needed money he had his notes, records of imprints that were of invaluable help, and he made his living as a psychiatrist. But for the most part he shunned contact with the bright world that John Murdoch had created. It didn't truly belong to him.

Murdoch.

A month passed. Dr. Schreber heard nothing of John, but in that time he thought of him all the same. Truthfully, a part of him was afraid. Without memories of a past, it was difficult for a man to attempt to envision the future. Schreber had never had the luxury of looking beyond the defeat of the Strangers. He had gambled, committed himself, invested in a course of action that he had believed—had prayed—would make that happen. He hadn't appreciated the full implications of what he'd done until the battle was over. That moment in the alley, when he realized he'd placed the power of a god into the hands of a man he barely knew.

It had been so easy for Schreber to deceive himself into thinking that he had _known_ who John Murdoch was. He should have known better. Experience had taught him that one could never predict what the end result of an imprint would be. Though the Strangers had never understood, Schreber had come into his own theories on the nature of the soul. The sum of a man was not in his memories, but it was not wholly in the mind either. It was when the two came together, he believed, that the whole became the thing with which one was inevitably confronted. And in the alley, he could only be sure that the half he'd created himself was sane enough—human enough—for the City and its inhabitants to survive its birth. Only half of the whole creature that he'd faced.

In the end, it seemed the game had played out in his favor. Mr. Murdoch had left the City more or less as it had been, the few improvements of which he had been made aware serving mostly to mold the world to the false reality its inhabitants would expect. His last evidence of Murdoch's activities had been the creation of Shell Beach, a small stretch of the paradise he'd devised for John's memories which the man had seen fit to create for himself. The City labored on, its inhabitants unaware of the depths of their own ignorance about their world, unaware of their true natures. Blissfully unaware that a being such as Murdoch even existed.

The thought had crept up on him once or twice at night, how things could have come to pass… He would wonder what might have happened if Murdoch's original imprint had taken hold. What would a man like the one he had been meant to create do with that kind of power—a man with the memories of a serial killer? Given the alternative, Schreber had decided that perhaps no news at all was best.

In light of these considerations, Schreber hoped he might be forgiven finding Murdoch's sudden return both unexpected and alarming.

Schreber had been working his usual late hours in the lab. Alone in the depths of the building, the room had been utterly still, completely silent. Laboring diligently, his attention was distracted from his endeavors by a disquieting sense of presence. Not something he could define at first, it crystallized slowly into the conviction that he was not alone. His heart gave a lazy lurch, skittering arhythmically in his chest. Several seconds scurried past before he had collected himself enough to turn around, each one warped by his sudden fear beyond its normal measure of time. When he did turn around he saw that he was not, indeed, alone any longer.

Leaning against the wall near the doorway, John Murdoch stood silently, watching him.

"John." The preternatural loudness with which the name rang out against the silence was in itself startling. For no reason he could immediately understand, it also filled him with a subtle disquietude. His own voice, as it reached his ears, was laced with an uncertain relief. A smirk pulled at the corner of John's mouth, an expression coming gradually to life that somehow put him in mind of the implacable, creeping way the Strangers had of stalking a target... And Schreber realized just what it was about the man's unexpected appearance that had him so unsettled.

"I did not hear—your footsteps." Though it might have been his imagination, it seemed that Murdoch's worrying smirk deepened.

"Maybe there weren't any."

An uncomfortable, unsteady silence reigned, looming with an almost palpable pressure. Searching John's face, Schreber tried to make sense of what he saw there. There was something hidden behind the other man's eyes that he could not identify. For a moment he was reminded of the Strangers, of eyes meant to mask soulless depths, which never the less left you well aware on some primitive level that you weren't dealing with anything remotely human. At that moment, Murdoch's unwaveringly cold stare evoked a similar reaction.

_A prey reaction_, his mind supplied. While not as inhuman as what he'd experienced with his persecutors, he felt certain that what he faced was a predator.

"Or maybe you were just too caught up in your research. I knew a man like that, once."

Briefly, Schreber was simply relieved that the peculiar, heavy silence had been broken. And John's dissecting gaze with it. Several heartbeats passed before he managed to process the other man's words. He frowned with a sort of startled confusion.

"To whom—are you referring?"

John did not reply immediately. He stepped away from the doorway, crossing the floor between them. He came to a halt near Schreber's desk, eyes roaming idly over the doctor's research.

"Don't _you_ know?" Murdoch spoke playfully, teasingly, but when he looked back up towards him, Schreber noted that his amused expression failed to reach his eyes. Instead, what he saw there was a sort of caged confusion. "You know everyone in my memories? You gave them to me."

With a shallow gasp of surprise Schreber realized what John was saying.

Drawing in a ragged breath, he tried to keep the thought from spinning out of his grasp. While so much of the Stranger's science was beyond human comprehension, if there were any expert in it living, then it had to be Schreber himself. In the years he'd done their work for them, played Judas goat to the subjects of their dark experiments, more than any other of their crafts he had come to understand the memory imprint. Nothing in what he knew suggested that it was even remotely possible to recover former memories once erased by the process. Of course, that was knowledge that the Strangers would have been sure to keep soundly out of his reach.

If it were possible, then perhaps he— But no, he could not afford that hope for himself.

"You're beginning to—remember things? From—before?" He shook his head, feeling for a moment that he had to be wrong about this. But only one alternative suggested itself to him, and the idea that a man with Murdoch's power might have gone insane…it did not bear thinking about. "That should not be—possible."

Across the room, John smiled eerily.

"You of all people should know, doctor. I'm…" He paused as though searching for a word. Upon finding it he intoned it flatly, breathlessly with only a note of satisfaction. "Special."

He seemed to savor the word a bit longer before his forehead creased slightly, the inner confusion Schreber had detected earlier finally reaching the surface. He cocked his head slightly, almost as though he were hearing something, before he turned toward Schreber. There was a searching element to his gaze, as though for a moment Murdoch hadn't known who he was. When it seemed it had passed, what was left was a strangely pleading look. Schreber found himself reminded with startling impact of the role he'd written for himself in John Murdoch's false memories. Though he did not have those memories for himself, he could almost imagine he was seeing a lost boy, begging once more to be pulled from the flames.

"I need your help, Dr. Schreber."


End file.
